Islamic inquiry
On self-critique as a fundamental tenet of Islam, women’s equality and the evolution of the Jamaat-e-islami.
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RFAN AHMAD, professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen, Germany, has carved out a reputation for himself as someone who can delve into the corridors of the faithful and come up with rare gems. A little under a decade ago, Ahmad, then based in Melbourne, revealed to readers the heart and head of the Jamaat-eislami, an organisation founded in 1941 by Abul Ala Maududi. Navigating through the chequered history of the organisation, he provided glimpses of the role of the madrasas in the life of believers and showed how faith acted as a glue on a population divided by language, attire, arts and abode.
His book Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of the Jamaat-e-islami (2009) was a profound exercise in understanding the Jamaat.
Not many scholars had sought to understand the Jamaat and its unique ideological persuasion. None had exhibited the breadth of understanding in doing so in English. Ahmad delineated the purpose of the Jamaat, its evolution and explained how an organisation that had fundamentally aimed at establishing a society on the Sharia came to use the tools of modern secular democracy and found a place of its own.
In the book under review, Ahmad makes bold to critique religion, not just reveal or expose it. Not for him patterns of parallelism, instead Ahmad goes into the hows and whys of Maududi’s politics. He shows how a man who was profoundly nationalist, and had written biographies of Mahatma Gandhi and Madan Mohan Malviya, found himself pushed to the margins of the polity rather than be allowed to swim along with the mainstream. The blame is laid at the door of the emerging contours of the Indian freedom struggle in the 1920s and, particularly, the 1930s. It was a time when the Indian National Congress, for all its frequent espousal of pluralism, failed to discern the differences between Hindu nationalism and Indian nationalism, much like a layman today often equates Hindutva with Hinduism. While prominent Hindutva votaries such as V.D. Savarkar, K.B. Hedgewar and M.S. Golwalkar had not yet overcome their inclination to see Muslims as the first enemy and the British as the next, the Congress was guilty of accommodating certain shades of religious nationalism that did not go down well with a vast section of the population, among them Maududi. Electoral compulsions and the struggle to achieve the larger goal of ousting the British from India made Congress leaders use the Ganapati mahotsav and other Hindu festivals to draw more people into the freedom movement. With prominence given to the likes of Madan Mohan Malaviya and Lala Lajpat Rai, Muslims were disaffected and almost disillusioned. If the immersion of Ganapati idols was synonymous with nationalism, there was little for Muslims in it. While some Muslims bought into the two-nation narrative propounded by the Muslim League, as indeed the Hindu Mahasabha, others chose to chart their own course.
Maududi was among them. His faith in a multireligious nation was shattered at the altar of electoral politics. He took recourse to religion and came to the conclusion that the interests of the Muslim community were best served by ushering in an order based on the Sharia. Thus came about the Jamaat-e-islami, founded by a man whose views evolved with the changing dynamics of politics around him. Many criticise him for this move, saying it had driven the community into insularity from which it is yet to recover.
However, unlike other scholars, Ahmad is able to explain why Maududi took this distinct course. When the Congress failed to difbased